patient submission

It’s a melancholy Sunday afternoon. It’s a bit weird actually, middle of summer (yesterday was the classic beach day) but now it’s raining and dark and I’ve got a slow brewing broth on the stove for some lamb and barley soup - so it smells like winter inside despite the fact I’m in shorts and T-shirt and shoeless. I had a celebratory morning with some swimming friends for a birthday, then did an open water swim in the river in glassy clear conditions before the dark clouds, thunder and rain defined the day.

Slow brewed stuff tastes better right? The flavours are deeper and richer and more complex. And even better when you’re doing it yourself because, like right now for me, you get to savour the process by being immersed in the aromas.

So why is it harder for me to savour slowly brewing stuff in the rest of life?

Stay with me on this for a few paragraphs …

Yesterday we had an open for inspection for our house. The rationale was that there would be lots of visitors around and we’d get some interest from folks who are wondering about a seachange. It was late in the afternoon before we heard back from the agent. Zip. Zero. Donut. No one. Silence.

Not withstanding that the reasons for the market being slow are well understood, it rocked me. I’ve been holding out hope that we’d sell our place for a reasonable price, the cascading implication of which is that I’ll need to work less. I’ve known in my head that we need to plan for 2025 assuming we don’t sell, but the implications are really only just sinking in.

So why is this such a big deal for me? Now that these musings are in the public domain I need to sidestep to explain. My apparently stable and bourgeoning work (& associated) income dramatically stopped without warning this time last year. I chose to effectively take a year’s sabbatical during 2024, during which I designed a new work initiative for the future. This work effort, among other things, included a commitment to subsidise my contribution to enable me to ‘do what I do’ to support social change leaders without the imperative that they pay commercial rates (when they don’t have an organisation to pay the fees) - which are out of reach for many of the people I want to support. The mechanism to achieve this, was to liquidate some cash by downsizing our house to an apartment. In parallel, this will facilitate what I describe as a radical decluttering, or sometimes as a commitment to live as essentialists.

So, instead of moving into a season of professional contribution liberated from commercial fee-for-service imperatives, I’m back on the hustings looking for work within a consulting system that I’m increasingly uncomfortable with. It’s an integrity issue for me.

Of course this is a problem of privilege. But it is inviting us into deep reflection on how we want to be in the world as society-as-we-have-known-it unravels around us. (If you don’t know what I mean by that, send me a note and I’ll try to explain in a subsequent post.)

So there is a lot up in the air for us. Where will we live? What living expenses will we embrace and how will we fund them? And more importantly, what does it mean to be a person in service to what the community around us needs? How do we stay engaged with people we like and love, but opt out of what we are so disillusioned with?

And I want the path to some definitive answers to this questions to come quickly!! Which is the point about slow brewing broth :-) I want to savour the brewing of life’s trajectories like I savour the aroma of what’s on the stove. Hmmm. Romantic in the sentiment. Freaking hard in the practice. Life problems that are solved rapidly without ‘long brewing’ time miss the depth and complexity of challenges with deferred gratification and mindful processes.

After my reaction to the absence of people through the house yesterday I went outside and washed my car, even though it arguably didn’t need it. And as I did so I thought about my three commitments as articulated in my previous post. To be responsible, grateful and of service. It transformed me … I came back inside having encountered the fear of uncertainty, and re-centered my soul.

I’m getting the feeling that this journey is going to take longer than I’d expected, and that there will be some surprises ahead.